Consultant Keith Ferrazzi explains how “radical adaptability” at the team and organizational levels helps some companies come out on top., founder of the consulting firm Ferrazzi Greenlight, surveyed more than 2,000 executives to learn how they changed their operations during the pandemic. The results show that some companies had already been cultivating a kind of extreme adaptability before the pandemic. That practice helped them come out on top.
Companies that do this in economic downturns can come out of them in a very different competitive position. Research shows that many of those that invest in technology and their workforces while still in the recession go from being industry laggards to leaders. CURT NICKISCH: Adaptability has always been a powerful business concept, right? But you’ve got that word radical in the title, radical adaptability. It’s almost like you’re trying to shake people a little bit by their shoulders. Do you sense some complacency out there?
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. And why? I mean, do you have the sense that something changed during the pandemic that is here to stay? KEITH FERRAZZI: What we identified in the research was that resilience was thought of as an individual sport. It was, I am resilient. What we saw though were that the organizations that thrived and had better engagement scores, less reported mental stress, stronger mental resilience, these organizations recognized that resilience was actually a team sport, where the team adopted a commitment to raise each other’s energy, to identify each other’s energy.
And it was such a simple and elegant safety net practice to bring into a team, but it’s more than just that. It creates bonding, empathy and relationship, which then breeds higher degree of psychological safety for risk-taking and for a challenger sense of safety in the room, et cetera. So there’s so many goodies that come from that simple, elegant little practice.
So the head of sales was looking at a customer and changes in customer. Head of marketing was looking at competition. The CFO was looking at macro economic, etc. Well, one individual didn’t even have a vantage point on this particular issue but one individual raised their hand and said “I read something about this virus going on in China.”
So across the board… We talked about resilience. Across the board we found that resilience used to be thought of as a policy issue, where organizations created policies to make sure that if somebody hit a wall that they’d be taking care of discreetly, privately, elegantly.
So we now have what we call Lego block workforce. We need to think about our employee base like a customer base. And increasingly, as you know, the gig working community is thriving. Individuals choosing to work on their own hours and plug and play into sometimes multiple companies or multiple projects at any given time. And the burden on a company to think about how to reassemble the Lego block workforce is an entirely new skillset than ever before.
Now, asynchronous collaboration flies in the face of an old myth or an assumption, which is that all collaboration is a meeting, or at least starts with the meeting. It’s a wonderful example of the chief operating officer of Delta Air Lines, Gil West, who moved over during the pandemic from the COO of Delta Air Lines to become the head of operations at Cruise, the unicorn self-driving automotive car company.
CURT NICKISCH: Another idea that you challenge your readers with is super charging your purpose. Purpose being one of those attributes that’s really been amplified by the pandemic. You showed how organizations that really had a good sense of purpose or put purpose at the front of their decision making, it made their decisions a lot easier.